Solidarity 156, 30 July 2009

The government’s White Paper, “Low Carbon Transition Plan” sets out the first legally binding carbon targets and a plan for a transition to a low carbon economy. As 600 Vestas workers struggle to keep their factories open, the government has been embarrassed by its claim that 1.2 million workers will be in the green energy sector by 2020. The paper was released in advance of international talks on these issues taking place in Copenhagen this December. The government is trying to position itself at the green end of the capitalist consensus that dominates establishment environmentalism. But...

The mainstream press has reported French workers’ adoption of radical tactics (such as “boss-napping”) in recent struggles with a note of amused disdain, as if the issues were unserious and the whole thing was an ostentatious piece of Gallic theatrics. But workers at the New Fabris car-parts factory near Poitiers, who recently threatened to destroy their bankrupt employer’s industrial machinery if they were not granted decent redundancy pay, are not playing games. Workers are used to threats from management — “come in five minutes late one more time, and you’re fired.” “Meet these targets or...

600 workers have been occupying the paint shop at the Ssangyong Motor plant in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, for over two months to protest over massive job cuts that are part of a restructuring plan. The company had planned to sack 36% of the workforce. Gas, water and food supplies to the paint shop were cut off ten days ago and riot police have surrounded the plant and are threatening a massive raid on the factory to evict the workers. The police have dropped tear-gas using helicopters and are working alongside company-hired thugs armed with baseball bats and martial arts weapons. The workers...

On Sunday 26 July, up to 20,000 according to press reports, marched against the threatened closure of the Diageo bottling plant in Kilmarnock. It was a massive display of opposition to the company’s plans. Diageo is the world’s biggest drinks company, with a worldwide workforce of 22,000. Its brands include Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff and Captain Morgan. Its profits over the last decade have averaged £2 billion a year. In the twelve months to July of this year, its pre-tax profits amounted to £2.093 billion. Diageo’s Chief Executive, Paul Walsh, was paid a total package of over £3.6...

28 April: Vestas bosses announce that they are ditching previous plans to re-fit the Isle of Wight plants for more advanced production methods, and will close them instead. They blame “a lack of political initiatives to support the wind industry” and say that “orders have ground to a halt” in Northern Europe. At this stage, however, they also say that it is “too early to say whether orders wwill pick up enough to rescue the plant”. 15 June: Workers’ Liberty activists arrive in the Isle of Wight to start leafleting and talking to workers about the Vestas factory closure and ways to resist it...

It all started on 15 June, when a small group of young members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty set off for the Isle of Wight. They had read in the press about the planned closure of Britain’s only wind turbine blade factories, operated by the Danish-based multinational Vestas at Venture Quays, East Cowes, and St Cross, Newport, on the Isle of Wight. They had discussed it among themselves and with other AWL members. They had cast around for contacts to give them a first foothold on the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t easy. The Isle of Wight — both a local-government county and a parliamentary...

The action taken at the Vestas wind turbine plant demonstrates the emergence not of a “red and green coalition” (as the Guardian would have it) but a realisation on the part of two social movements that they are inextricably linked. The environmental movement has realised that the only system capable of making the economic changes required to achieve sustainability is one of democratically controlled, social production. In parallel, the socialist movement has realised the imminence of environmental destruction — we cannot wait until the democratisation of production before we build a...

The AWL’s motto and guideline is what Leon Trotsky called “the rules” for revolutionary socialists: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives”. We see other would-be revolutionary-socialist groups, like the SWP and the Socialist Party, as abandoning those rules in favour of what we call “Apparatus...

Activists from the RMT union, which mainly covers rail, bus, and sea workers, joined the Vestas workers outside the factory from very early on. These were not full-time officials, but branch representatives from the RMT Portsmouth branch which organises the Portsmouth-Ryde ferry workers, especially Richard Howard, branch secretary, and Mick Tosh, branch chair. One way or another, they managed to work their union facility time and leave from work so as to be at the site almost 24/7, providing help and advice. It was a model of what good trade unionists should do: going to the aid of other...

I remember first hearing about a wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight being shut down at the Workers’ Liberty conference back in May. We decided that someone should go down there. Why did I volunteer? We’d been talking about “voluntarism” — the necessary element in socialist politics of making things happen by will-power and initiative. I travelled to the island on 15 June with two other AWL members, Ed Maltby and Pat Rolfe, and stayed for a couple of days to make contact with local labour movement activists. Members of the local Trades Councils had been campaigning around Vestas, but...